The Second Pillar : Enterprise Wide Analytics

Up until this point, Third Star Financial Services has operated via a succession of mergers and acquisitions where systems were inherited but never integrated into the network. Its data management has been virtually non-existent and entirely ineffective. Evidence of this can be found in the absence of an enterprise-wide data management solution and the presence of several disparate systems operating independently with no measurable benefit to the company. Due to a lack of actionable data, management makes decisions based on instinct rather than through analysis. A direct consequence of this is a steadily declining market share and loss of high-level employees to competing companies. Fortunately, this discrepancy has been identified and Third Star executives have established the new goal of modernizing and streamlining operations. Using concepts outlined by the Data Management Association (DAMA), this proposed enterprise architecture will allow Third Star to transform their data from a liability to an asset.

Our company is located in downtown Pittsburgh. Based off of location alone, we are the leading competitor in our region. I discuss below how we can use this as a competitive advantage with analytics. River’s Casino has multiple employees and departments within the organization who contribute to competing with analytics in various ways.

The goals have been set and data analytics best practices need to be monitored. The experienced gained in this phase will shape the next course of action based on external and internal issues. As the data is formulated, it will identify the strengths and the weaknesses, threats and opportunities for improvements. Because the internal and external issues will continue

One of the trends in performance dashboards was that “Visual-data-discovery tools have become synonymous with self-service BI and are growing at three times the pace of the overall BI market” . Fortunate for the customer service team, the Tableau tool that had been implemented was reviewed as one of the top “Leaders” in the Gartner Magic Quadrant in 2013 and continued to expand its functionality. After the consolidation of the customer service tools under one system, the Tableau dashboard tool provided the infrastructure to expand insights across the organization in a more meaningful way. The business intelligence team, therefore, deployed Tableau to the field given that self-service BI was not only the trend in the industry, but because it was also the most effective and efficient way to relay insights and results. Within the field, the HQ business intelligence team first deployed the dashboard tool to the BI teams to provide them with the flexibility to slice the data in a multitude of ways to provide insights directly to their

Despite the complex nature of a system or building a system, there are a several other ways to obtain the same information needed for decision making. If this is so cumbersome for management, I will recommend that management looks for means to outsource analytics. Outsourcing is a lot more affordable. You have agencies that have readily deployable solutions. This will be resourceful at the early stage but it will always be necessary to take ownership in the long term.

Sumangla Rathore, Avinash Panwar, Prakriti Soral (2014). Critical Factors for Successful Implementation of Business Analytics: Exploratory Findings from Select Cases. International Journal of Business Analytics and Intelligence, 2(2), 14-15.

An Executive Dashboard is a visual representation, which illustrates executives a easy way to view their company’s performance in real-time. It is a key performance indicators (KPIs) which helps us to run an enterprise effectively. Executive Dashboard is a management tool for setting targets for an organization at each level to understand easily and reporting the status of progress throughout the year.

Business Analytics and Reporting is one of the key focuses of the Business Advisory department, which I am currently apart of. You could say that from an external perspective with our clients, the Business Advisory department of AC Lordi Consulting has fully embraced the needs for analytics to guide and strengthen the decision making of our clients. When clients are facing challenging financial decisions, the Business Advisory department is able to provide the knowledge and expertise beyond the capabilities of their own organization. AC Lordi Consulting has the ability to provide highly skilled professionals in analytics that will develop the proper framework and methodology to have our clients embrace analytics and reporting. AC Lordi Consulting provide a structured framework to answer all the relevant questions, suggest KPI’s that can be measured in the industry and implement target ranges where KPI’s should fall within.

The article by Chandler (2015) “The Business Intelligence and Analytics Leader 's First 100 Days” hit a cord with me after a talk with a friend of mine who was just added to the BI team at his company. The new BI director at my friend’s company could have used this article to help him with his new role of BI director. My friend’s boss came in with prebaked ideas and thought he knew what the company needed from the BI department, but after 380 days the department is still feeling its way around in the dark.

An increasing amount of businesses are exploring this new concept of analytics. In today’s tech-savvy era, the use of analytics can be seen as a necessity rather than a competitive advantage. More companies are realizing the benefits that come with the use of analytics within the business environment. Like anything else, there are both pros and cons that come with this approach. However, the benefits far outweigh the negatives. Business analytics are the future of the business world. This paper will describe a general overview of business analytics and its application to the real world.

Stage 2 - These organizations have implemented localized analytic solutions with some data elements and reporting, but they lack the big picture view of implementing enterprise-wide analytics activities. There are department specific silos of data and reports to meet functional needs.

Business analytics, in a nutshell, is usage of the type of data that can help one analyze a particular business situation and decide how to improve it. Instruments used for such an assessment include statistics, and both quantitative and qualitative analysis, as well as predictive and explanatory modeling.

“Cognos Business Intelligence was by far the most popular solution, with more than 600 users across the business already reaping the value of its extensive capabilities,” explains Vangala. “This meant there was a lot of expertise that we could leverage, and the wider adoption of the solution was a natural evolution. Using IBM Cognos BI, we saw success very quickly, and the executive management team took notice, which led to the decision to make it the corporate standard.” After the initial implementation, the demand for analytics grew steadily within the business, and the Business Intelligence team continued to develop new solutions – not only reports, but also real-time dashboards and OLAP cubes for ad-hoc

In every long term strategic planning, many companies considered data collection and analysis as a fundamental activity. Big companies that strive to achieve a sustainable advantage over their competition made use of information management system to help them analyze their data. These activities have evolved to what is now known as business intelligence of BI.

Distinctive Capability - ABC has a demonstrated capability to use analytics to create a competitive advantage from an investment management standpoint. Millions of data points must be continuously analyzed to ensure passive stock and bond investments, totaling in the trillions of dollars, are efficiently managed for performance and risk. On the client side the diverse business structures and the prior focus on efficient operations has to date limited ABC’s ability to build out a world class data analytics capability comparable to the one that exists on the investment side of their business.